Rick Santorum greets voters in New Hampshire (Source: Yahoo News)

South Carolina is emerging as the key battleground in the Republican primary for 2012–and the campaigns are accelerating their ad buys in the state.

Since his success in Iowa, Rick Santorum has raised $2 million in two days, $250,000 of it online. Santorum is using the money for a 1,000-point television ad buy in South Carolina–a very significant campaign, aiming, generally, to ensure that the targeted audience sees the ad ten times. (Air time is cheaper in South Carolina than in Iowa or New Hampshire, where the same ad buy would be more expensive.)

When Santorum enters the TV ad market, he’ll find he’s got competition. According to data obtained by Big Government, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, and Rick Perry have purchased $295,273, $486,118, and $223,992, respectively, worth of television ads thus far. (SuperPACs supporting Romney and Paul have booked $147,000 and $185,000 respectively. Another SuperPAC supporting Romney spent $1.1 million last month. A SuperPAC supporting Santorum is preparing a significant ad buy of its own.)

There’s little other data to guide predictions in South Carolina: prior to last night, here had not been a poll reported from South Carolina since December 18, 2011–fully eighteen days prior. That is an eternity in this election cycle. Eighteen days before the Iowa caucuses, Gingrich was leading them. On caucus night, he was in a distant fourth place. Such is the fluidity of polling in this presidential campaign.

The Democratic polling firm, Public Policy Polling, had Romney leading by ten points in South Carolina last night, on its first night of polling.  Remember, though, that this was the same polling firm that predicted Ron Paul would win the Iowa caucuses. It routinely overstates moderate Republican support and discounts conservative Republican support. Still, if that ten points holds, the race is over.

Rasmussen’s numbers–just out this morning–are a more optimistic for Santorum, and reflect his new status as the top contender to challenge Romney. With Romney at 27 percent, Santorum at 24 percent, and Gingrich at 13 percent, the new numbers suggest a significant shift in the race. Perry is a distant fifth (behind Ron Paul) at 5 percent. (more…)

After a disappointing fifth place finish, Perry said he was going back to Texas to “reassess” his campaign. Some have suggested he is all but certain to drop out after having spent some $4 million in Iowa, only to get 10% of the vote. He spent upwards of $300 per vote, compared to just 73 cents for Santorum. To be sure, that’s bad, but perhaps it isn’t nearly as bad as people make it out to be when there were only a few thousand votes separating the first from last.

It isn’t over yet. After all, Governor Rick Perry likes to run. He tweeted a picture of himself running, wearing his Texas A&M running shorts and giving a thumbs-up, with the caption “the next leg of the marathon is the Palmetto State. … Here we come South Carolina!!!”

Perry likes running so much that, on one occasion in 2010, with his laser-sighted pistol in hand, he killed a coyote while running, sending it “to where coyotes go.”  He believes that jogging can help him get his mojo back and win the Iowa caucus after suffering spinal surgery this summer.

Now he’s running in his eleventh straight election–the first out of Texas–for the presidency. So how’s Perry doing in his first national bid?

Not well. Indeed, if you believe the conventional political narrative, his campaign ended when he said “oops” during a November debate. Political commentary was unforgiving. Larry J. Sabato spoke for many when he said, ”To my memory, Perry’s forgetfulness is the most devastating moment of any modern primary debate.”

But as so often is the case, the conventional narrative is wrong–or, at least, exaggerated. Governor Perry is actually doing quite well. Does this sound like a moribund campaign? (more…)

The last few votes are still being counted, and as of this writing Sen. Rick Santorum is on the verge of a stunning upset victory over Gov. Mitt Romney in the Iowa caucuses, leading by a margin of just several dozen votes.

(Update: The lead has changed hands yet again, with a few results still out. Update: And again! Now Santorum’s 5 votes up. Update 1:34 a.m. CST: Romney has now won by only 8 votes. What a ride.)

Yet regardless of who finds more votes in the final boxes, it seems clear that Iowa’s conservatives have chosen Santorum.

The maps below say it all.

The upper map is from the Des Moines Register, and shows the county-by-county results in tonight’s caucuses. The red counties are those where Santorum has won or is leading; the blue counties are going for Romney, and the yellow counties to Paul. (Two counties in pink went to Perry; Gingrich, who bested Perry statewide, did not win any counties.)

The lower map is from the New York Times, and shows the county-by-county election results from November 2008.

It’s clear that while Romney and Paul have largely won in areas that went for Barack Obama, Santorum’s wins have tended to come in areas that voted for John McCain. (more…)

BreitbartTV is taking you LIVE inside an Ames caucus for an exclusive look at this part of our democratic process. We’ll be quietly observing the caucus proceedings while bringing commentary to give you the best look of what happens in this widely publicized political event.

Join us after the caucus at Breitbart.tv as we deliver the results from the Iowa caucus media center throughout the evening.

Our friends over at the Claremont Review of Books have a delightful and exhaustive review of several books on the Iowa caucuses.

For people in Iowa, perhaps more than in other states, a candidate’s pedigree and prejudices are relevant, and can play a role in the electoral outcome. Hillary Clinton’s contempt and snobbery in the 2008 election was surely detectable, and may have lead the former frontrunner to her distant third place finish.

Being from a rural, neighboring state seems to help a candidate’s chances, which may give credence to the critics of the fairness of Iowa, but it also gives a political voice to the Midwest in campaigns which are often focused on the coasts. Long-time Des Moines Register reporter David Yepsen noted that “[o]ne pattern that appears to be developing in the Iowa caucuses is a preference for Midwestern, or at least rural-oriented candidates. George McGovern of South Dakota, Walter Mondale of Minnesota, and Richard Gephardt of Missouri have all done well in the Iowa Democratic caucuses. But so did that Georgia peanut farmer, Jimmy Carter.” Yepsen recently noted that “politicians in the Midwest know how to campaign to people in the Midwest. The audiences demographically are much the same.”

Presidential candidates from the prairie Midwest may have enjoyed somewhat of a regional advantage in the past, but Carter (twice), George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Kerry make this much less than an iron-clad rule. Even if, however, the Midwestern candidate advantage were true, this would be acceptable, since it would be good to give the Midwest a loud voice in the presidential selection process, especially in an age in which the coastal media dominates the cultural and political discourse. As Why Iowa? notes, the Iowa caucuses force coastal media elites to visit “Middle America, a place that many have never visited.” Iowa serves as a proxy for the wider Midwest and helps to make the presidential selection process more representative of the interests of Middle America. Iowa bears the weight of this representation burden well, as demonstrated by its record of civic obligation, open elections, and fair politics. The historian Dorothy Schwieder says that Iowa has “a sense of rootedness…that implies stability, permanence, and continuity; there is also a centeredness that connotes balance in both perspective and behavior. At the same time, Iowans are not known for showiness, glitz, or hype.” Iowans have a healthy sense of place, unlike some transient, coastal Americans. The historian Laurence Lafore once noted that “Iowans always speak of themselves as Iowans.”

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“The very people who supported Obama in ’08 are the Occupy organizers,” David Goodner told The Los Angeles Times this week. “That same energy has shifted from the electoral arena to the streets.” Obama, says Goodner, gave birth to the Occupy movement when he “failed to deliver” on the promise of widening the tax base, securing Medicare and Social Security, abolishing “Wall Street greed” and limiting campaign spending.

So who is David Goodner?

He is a 30-year-old veteran Iowa protestor, who works with Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement Action Fund. He is frequently arrested and in controversy, so much so that the FBI infiltrated his organization because they were concerned he might be plotting to disrupt the 2008 RNC Convention.

Though no one will say it officially, Goodner, who vows to disrupt the Iowa caucus, is part of the reason the Iowa Republican party announced on Tuesday it was moving its voting tabulation to a secure location.

Last week he was escorted out of a security during a news conference headed by Newt Gingrich. The picture above really is worth a thousand words.

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Ron Paul is the presumptive frontrunner of the Iowa caucus, but this comes with its share of caveats, oftentimes lost in the news cycle.

First, the implications of a Paul victory are muted in a state where, at most, only 125,000 people will show up to vote out of a total eligible voter pool of 1.28 million people.  It’s difficult to draw any clear implications about a national election in which 125,000 people cast ballots in a nation of 300 million.

Iowans are correct when they say organization matters, but sometimes the most organized people can oftentimes have the most radical message or simply the most voter identification. In 1988, Kansan Bob Dole and the Reverend Pat Robertson beat Vice President George H. W. Bush.  In 1992, native Iowan Tom Harkin bested Bill Clinton, but lost the nomination. In 2008, Mike Huckabee placed first, while John McCain, who won the nomination, placed fourth.  It takes a lot of organizing to turn out the vote and with at least seven candidates. Even now two-thirds of likely voters have yet to decide how they will vote. This is why you should expect to see more of these last minute endorsements and calls for candidates to drop out, lest one voting bloc be split.

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The hacking collective known as Anonymous has allegedly targeted the Iowa caucus’s voting machines.

According to the Associated Press, there are two tools that the “hacktivists” could use to create some chaos. The first is a “denial of service” request, which sends thousands of requests to a website server and makes it useless. The second is a SQL injection, which inserts a code into a website’s software, thereby exploiting its vulnerabilities and forcing it to execute the hacker’s code.

It wouldn’t be the first time that SQL insertions were used to try to rock the vote. In Sweden’s elections in 2010 a voter tried to insert an SQL insertion in the vote by hand-writing. Presumably a hacker could try something similar at the Iowa caucus.

There are other worse examples of SQL insertions being dangerous. In 2010, Washington D.C. conducted a pilot project to allow overseas and military voters to download and return absentee ballots over the website. The city made the system open to the public for only three days, but that was just enough time for J. Alex Halderman, a professor in computer science at the Univesity of Michigan, to expose some of the systems flaws. Within 36 hours of the system going live, our team had found and exploited a vulnerability that gave us almost total control of the server software, including the ability to change votes and reveal voters’ secret ballots,” Halderman wrote.

Alas, were such an attack carried out in the Iowa caucus, it wouldn’t be the first time an SQL inserted caused great harm. The Royal Navy’s website was attacked in that manner by a Romanian hacker.

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Are you ready for the “Occupy Iowa Caucus” headed by a would-be Iowa governor?

On Tuesday, December 27, at 7 P.M. the attention-seeking Occupiers are rolling into Iowa, throwing their own caucus just two days after Christmas.

Allegedly ill-served by the political process, Ed Fallon, former failed Democratic candidate for governor, is helping to organize the first caucus in the nation to defeat the attention given to that other first in the nation caucus. (That, by the way, is what the Occupy Movement is all about. Getting attention!)

Ed Fallon is a long-term Democratic party hack. He served 14 years in the assembly where he had such legislative gems as this: a proposed law banning candy cigarettes because he says youths couldn’t be trusted to know the difference between a real cigarette and a sweet.

Now that he’s out of office, he’s into the county jail. He’s disturbing the peace, getting arrested, and going behind bars. Fallon was one of three dozen protestors who refused to vacate statehouse grounds at 11 p.m. on October 9.

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NEW YORK (AP) - Donald Trump says he is pulling out of a Republican presidential debate he had agreed to moderate in Iowa.

Donald Trump says he is pulling out of a Republican presidential debate he had agreed to moderate in Iowa.The real estate mogul announced Tuesday that he was stepping back in order to preserve the option of running for president in case he’s not satisfied that the eventual Republican nominee can defeat President Barack Obama. The conservative website Newsmax was to host the debate Dec. 27.

But the debate has been in jeopardy ever since Mitt Romney signaled he would not participate. Other candidates bowed out. Only Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum agreed to take part.

Many Republican strategists warned that a presidential debate moderated by Trump, star of “Celebrity Apprentice,” would create a circus-like atmosphere that might diminish the candidates vying to challenge Obama.

THOMAS BEAUMONT (AP) – WASHINGTON Iowa Republicans are holding their state’s presidential nominating caucuses on Jan. 3, even though New Hampshire is threatening to move its traditional first-in-the-nation primary into December.

Iowa Republican Party Chairman Matt Strawn says voters and candidates need the certainty of a firm date.

Florida’s decision last month to move its primary to Jan. 31 set off a chain reaction by early-voting states to preserve their leadoff status.

New Hampshire’s chief election official says Nevada’s decision this month to hold caucuses Jan. 14 would crowd the primary, and has threatened to hold his before the holidays.

Strawn admits the Iowa GOP board’s vote Monday puts his state at risk of falling behind New Hampshire. But he points to 2008 when Iowa went Jan. 3, followed by New Hampshire Jan. 8.

From CNN Politics:

CNN has exclusively learned that Rep. Michele Bachmann will form a presidential exploratory committee. The Minnesota Republican plans to file papers for the committee in early June, with an announcement likely around that same time.

But a source close to the congresswoman said that Bachmann could form the exploratory committee even earlier than June so that she could participate in early Republican presidential debates.

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